


Tartarus

by ssrhpurgatory



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Art, F/M, Mild Gore, Mindfuck, Sometimes an AI virus can’t decide whether she wants to fuck with you or fuck you, and Hilbert backstory, manic pixie dream AI meets depressed gremlin nightmare scientist, this was supposed to be porn without plot and turned into plot with occasional smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-01-26 21:28:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21380848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Eris decides to torment Elias Selberg by wearing the face of a dead woman.(Has an art gallery at the end now.)
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Eris, Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Comments: 5
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

“Privyet, Dmitri.”

Elias Selberg froze. That voice did not belong to anyone on this station... and no one on this station would have known to call him Dmitri.

No one had called him that name for more than a decade. No one had known it, aside from that hellbeast who oversaw the Black Archive and Marcus Cutter, and Elias wasn’t entirely certain that Cutter hadn’t discarded his knowledge of Elias’s birth name during one of the many transformations the man had undergone since he had brought Dmitri Vologin to work at Goddard Futuristics.

So no, no one alive still called Elias that.

But one dead woman had often used that name when she had wanted to make sure that she had his attention.

It was not her voice, of course, but when Elias turned to face the owner of the voice, the woman in front of him was unmistakably Rosemary Epps. Once his lab manager, now...

He studied the woman carefully. She was young and vital, her hair in a great pouf of curls around her head, wearing a dress and heels that were completely inappropriate for both microgravity and a space station but which suited her plump form well. “You cannot be her,” he found himself saying, somewhat distantly. “You are far too young, and her Russian was never so good.”

The apparition laughed at him. “Oh, it is so good to finally meet you.” The voice continued to be wrong, but the cadence... he felt his breath catch in his throat. That cadence was pure Rosemary.

There were two options, he thought.

Option one: he was hallucinating, and this was what his mind had chosen to conjure up. Perhaps not entirely out of question, given the solar flare activity they were expecting later in the day. Some of the radiation Wolf 359 put off was nothing like what he might encounter on Earth; misfiring neurons presenting a hallucination of his former lab manager as a young woman might be the least distressing thing he would see today.

Option two... option two was the more likely. He and his fellow crew mates could still be locked in the simulation inside Box 953, which meant...

“What are you? Some kind of command program?”

The almost-Rosemary laughed. “I’m Eris,” she said, offering a hand as if to shake, and withdrawing it with a shrug moments later when Elias only eyed it dubiously.

“Eris.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“And what is your purpose?”

Eris grinned naughtily, looking so much like Rosemary as he had known her that for a moment, he could not breathe. “Not telling.” She put her finger to her lips, as if to shush him... and then, with a loud pop of displaced air, she was gone.

Elias went back to work after Eris left his lab. He wasn’t sure there was any point to the work, not now that he knew he was in one of Miranda Pryce’s simulations, but working was better than sitting there and doing nothing... and, after his attempt to open his lab door found it locked and his attempt to use the intercom system to call for help had been met with dead silence, he was fairly certain that he was not going to be allowed to do anything else.

As he worked, he tried to make sense of it. Eris. _Eris_. He knew the name from Greek mythology, of course. The goddess of strife and discord. And Miranda Pryce was so very fond of naming her creations after gods and goddesses.

Had he heard of this AI before?

Eris. He ran the name through his head once more. Eris.

And then he remembered the rumors he had heard of an AI virus who was unleashed upon crews that failed to cohere properly, on crews where discord and strife were the day to day order of things. He had dismissed them as nonsense.

Perhaps they weren’t quite as much nonsense as he had thought.

Elias was hunched over a microscope examining one of the tissue samples from Officer Fisher when he heard the tell-tale pop of Eris reappearing in his lab. Naturally, he ignored her, unwilling to give such an uninformative AI more attention than she deserved, which was none at all, even if, given the rumors he had heard, she controlled this all.

Ignoring her was a choice he regretted a moment later when he was suddenly eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose with the AI virus. Elias swallowed a startled yelp and shoved himself backwards, his momentum sending him to the wall behind him, where he grabbed onto a handhold to steady himself, clutching his other hand to his chest. Eris had flopped across the table, chest first, somehow going through the microscope. He knew that this was all in his head, and that Eris didn’t need to pay attention to the normal rules of matter, but it was disconcerting all the same, especially when she tilted her head to one side and the eyepiece of the microscope emerged from her cheek.

“What do you want?”

“I’m bored,” she complained, Rosemary’s impish smile on her face. She rolled over, dangling the upper half of her body off the edge of his worktable, obviously subject to a gravity that he could not feel. “Entertain me.”

“There are five other people you could be bothering,” he snapped, glaring at her. Though no doubt she had goals she wished to achieve with every member of this crew, not that he needed to make any changes.

Eris launched herself off the worktable and came to a floating halt in front of him, swift as a bolt of lightning. “They’re not as much fun as you. Fighting, fighting, fighting, and I didn’t have a thing to do with it. Whereas you...” She reached out and trailed her finger down his chest. Elias shivered, but could not quite bring himself to shove her away, not even when she leaned in close, her face a bare inch from his. “All I have to do is wear this face, and you cook up a great storm of turmoil.” The corners of her eyes creased in amusement. “So delicious.”

Elias jerked his head to one side at that, dizzy and distressed. She was right, though. Even a Rosemary younger than Elias had ever known her was still Rosemary, and he remembered so very many details about her, details that Eris was no doubt feeding off of and using to make her disguise more real... and he bore so much guilt where Rosemary was concerned that if Eris wished for discord, she would find it aplenty in his mind.

“You are nothing like her,” he growled, knowing it wasn’t entirely true as he said it.

Eris seemed to know it too. He watched that impish smile grow broader out of the corner of his eye. “How do you think I got this body in the first place, Dmitri? No one at Goddard ever knew her so young.”

Elias turned back to face her, frowning. “Dr. Pryce said that her brain scan was unsuccessful—“

Eris snorted. “Pryce was trying to do too much with too little back then.” She slid her arm up around his neck, pressing that lush, plump body she wore up against the length of him. “She just didn’t have the processing power that she needed.” Eris’ lips were brushing against the upper curve of his ear now, and Elias shivered. “And by the time she did...” her lips pressed for a moment against the side of his head, “...Pryce understood how foolhardy it would be to try and use a real person as the core of an AI. Too unstable.”

“Whereas instability is your goal.” Elias took a deep breath, trying to keep himself calm... and not because he was afraid of Eris, though he was that, too. But what she was doing to him now was torturous for another reason.

Blyad, but he had loved Rosemary. Even though she had not believed him. Even though his foolishness in thinking he could save her had lead only to her swift and terrible death, in the end.

“Better than cancer,” she had said with a smile when blood had first started filling her lungs, when lesions had first spread across her body, turning that warm brown skin of hers into a battlefield. “Better than cancer,” she had said, though they both had known that whether that illness or Decima would be her cause of death was a matter of mere chance.

Elias thought it had been the virus that had killed her, in the end.

He had never been sure.

Eris was looking him in the eye, more solemn than he had seen her since she had first appeared in his lab, no doubt following along with his wandering thoughts. She gave a little shrug, as if to say “it is what it is,” and Elias sighed.

“You know she was attracted to you too,” Eris said quietly, reaching her free hand up to trace a tendon in his neck, her fingers gentle and surprisingly warm against him.

It was not so much of a surprise. He had kissed Rosemary once, shortly after discovering that she was dying, shortly after offering her Decima, shortly after she had refused him that offer for the first time. He had kissed her, and she had accused him of trying to use her attraction for him as a bargaining tool to win her over to his side, to convince her to take Decima. After berating him for that, for what she thought was him making a pretense of friendship, she had walked him through the painful logic of laying out the real reasons she would make an excellent test subject: she had known his research almost as well as he did, and she had been dying.

She had called herself expendable, and that had hurt more than anything else. She had never been expendable to him.

He had still used her as if she were.

“What would you have done if she had kissed you back?” Eris asked, pulling back from him, looking him up and down from arm’s length, that impish smile back in place once more.

Elias laughed, just a little hysterical, and shook his head. “Do you know, I do not know? I had not thought further than that kiss. Not when...” he reached up with his free hand, the one that wasn’t still clinging to a handhold, and ran it over the smooth expanse of his scalp, one of the legacies he carried from Volgograd. “It was never easy. So I did not make it a priority. Few had patience for...” he shrugged.

Eris kept that smile of Rosemary’s on her borrowed face, and Elias let himself pretend it truly was Rosemary’s smile for a moment. “Here we have all the time in the world,” she said, pulling herself close to him once more, her lips barely brushing his. “And physical limitations aren’t quite so limiting.” Her free hand was tracing its way down the front of his body, and Elias shut his eyes, shivering like a horse about to bolt.

“In truth, I do not think I had a chance with her,” he said out loud, trying to distract himself from what Eris was doing. “Not even if there was an attraction. After all, she was... and I am...” He let out a low hiss of breath. One of the AI virus’s hands was still resting against his shoulder, her thumb caressing what was clearly an extremely sensitive place behind his ear where his pulse thrummed hard and fast, but the other... the other had somehow slipped through the fabric of the flight suit he wore in order to—“Oh, _blyad_,” he cursed, as her fingers closed around his cock, which was now hard and standing against his stomach and more sensitive to the touch than it had ever been. “Is that what it is meant to feel like?”

He opened his eyes to find Eris staring contemplatively down at his groin, where his erection was obvious, and not just because her hand had phased through his clothing to touch him. “I’m not sure,” she said, her voice rich with amusement and somehow not so different than Rosemary’s voice had been, after all. “I’m extrapolating a bit. Rosemary might have been experienced, but...”

“Was she this—“

“—sensitive? Oh yes.” Eris’s lips were on his neck now, her tongue darting out to taste his skin. “But I’m sure you already had some idea of it.After all, you listened in on her.”

With his apartment side-by-side with hers for so many years, with their bedrooms sharing a wall, he had not been able to avoid it. He had tried not to, of course, had left his apartment for the lab when it became clear she had company, but curiosity had been a potent force. Curiosity, and a lust for the woman that he was only just recognizing now.

He let himself relax under her touch, let his cheek brush hers, pretended for a moment that this was really Rosemary, cuddled up against him, her fingers slowly stroking him into insensibility. “I cannot say that this feels right,” he said softly against her ear. “This face you are wearing is very young. And I…” He lifted his hand and placed it gently on her shoulder, wincing at the sight of the hollows and age spots he now bore, his fingers stark and sickly pale against the warm brown of her skin.

Eris pulled back and tilted her head to one side, smiling coyly up at him. “The oldest I can do is her as you last saw her,” she said, and then suddenly Elias was holding a horror in his arms, one of skin and flesh sloughing off in chunks from a body that barely resembled a human any more.

Elias let out a shout and shoved her roughly away. “Get out!” he heard himself yelling. “Go away and leave me be!”

Eris flew backwards across his lab, slower than she should have given the power of his shove. She laughed eerily all the while, slowly transforming back into the form she had worn when she had first entered the room, of Rosemary as he thought she must have looked in her twenties, albeit one who wore a decidedly modern look rather than the more restrictive styles of the 50s and 60s. “I see you’re in no mood to play right now,” she said, a pretense of a pout puckering her mouth. “Well, I suppose I’m just about needed elsewhere at this point. Ta-tah!” She waved cheerily at him and disappeared from the room with a pop.

Elias shut his eyes and clung to the handhold with both hands, breathing deep and trying to steady himself. Oh, he really had wanted what she was offering for a moment. A promise of intimacy, with someone who he didn’t have to hide part—most—of himself from, with someone who knew the worst he was capable of and still did not flinch from him.

He had wanted to undo the past.

He had wanted Rosemary back in whatever way was possible, no matter how foolhardy, even if it meant cozying up to an AI virus who only wanted to wind him up. He had wanted to pretend, for a moment, that he had made different choices with his life, that he could have made different choices, even though, at the time, each next step had followed in a logical, irresistible path that he had been unable to avoid following to its inevitable end.

He missed her. He had not realized how much, not until he had seen Eris in Rosemary’s stolen form, bright and beautiful and so, so tempting.

Elias did not know how long he clung to the wall, trying to sort through his feelings, trying to force himself back into action. Eventually, though, he unclenched himself from the wall, moved back to his work table, began his study of the samples he had taken from Fisher earlier that day once more. Not that there was any point to it; even if he found signs that the retrovirus was doing the job it was meant to do, he would not know if they were truly signs that he was getting closer to his goal, or whether it was just the simulation providing the results he would expect to find.

He did not know how long he stayed there, hovering next to his microscope, examining slide after slide and taking notes as he went, letting the work numb his mind and dull his anxiety. It could have been mere minutes.

It could have been days.

There was a pop. Elias turned his head and acknowledged Eris’s return with a glare. She smiled back at him, her eyes wide and innocent. “I’ll be good this time,” she promised.

“You have to know that I do not believe you in the slightest.” Elias turned back to his microscope, ignoring her once more, even when she pulled herself close in behind him and pressed a kiss behind his ear.

“All I know is that you never liked Rosemary because she was a _good_ woman,” Eris purred against the back of his neck. “You liked her because she was intelligent and clever and sometimes kind, but you and I both know that she was never good.”

All true, those words. Alexander glanced down, to where Eris had wrapped her arms around his waist from behind.

Arms that were now in a bright purple suit jacket.

He took one of her hands in his and used it as a lever to spin his body around to face Eris. She had traded the halter-strapped modern dress she had been in for one of the brightly colored suits Rosemary had preferred in the 90s, her young face for that of Rosemary as he had best known her. A body still younger than his had become in the years since her death, but one he could bear to touch.

One he wanted to touch, in spite of the nasty trick she had played on him earlier.

She looked up at him, strangely hesitant now. “I will be good,” she said in a low, quiet voice. “I think I didn’t realize how much I wanted this too. Not until...” her jaw tensed for a moment, her teeth digging into her lower lip, a nervous gesture he had seen time and time again from Rosemary. “Not until it seemed like it might not happen,” she added, her voice lower still and rasping in her throat.

He knew that he could not trust her to not do again what she had done earlier, could not trust her to not find some other means of tormenting him, but Elias did not care. He seized her face in both hands, pulling her into a frantic, desperate kiss. He half expected her to change then, to become the horror of Rosemary dying of Decima once more, just to hurt him again.

She did not. Her mouth opened under his and she kissed him back, her arms sliding up around his shoulders and holding him fast.

And then suddenly things were even more fast and frantic between them, the skirt of her suit rucked up around her waist, his flight suit unzipped, her legs wrapped around his body and his hips pressed hard against hers, his cock buried deep within her. Sex had been a slow and careful thing his entire life, a process that did not provide much pleasure at all when he had chosen to partake in it, a constant fight against the nerve damage Volgograd had left him with.

This was not slow.

It was explosive.

All too soon, he found himself clinging to Eris, to Eris in Rosemary’s body, breathless and completely wrung out.

“That was...” he attempted to say.

Eris pulled back from him, her eyes wide and frightened, and disappeared with a pop.

He just hoped that it was not him she had been afraid of.

Time passed. Once more, he did not know how much. He spoke to his crew mates, no doubt only because Eris allowed it, pulled in to consult on the puzzle she had posed them about the fate of the crew of the Valkyrie. He had been angry with Eris, for what she threatened him with if his crew mates did not answer correctly. 

But she did not return to Elias, and that anger faded.

Elias attempted to return to his work, but he found himself unable to concentrate. He had been shaken by that encounter—by the sex he had had—with Eris. Not just because he had been pretending she was Rosemary, not just because of the fast and frantic nature of it, but...

She had seemed affected by it, he realized. How or why, he did not know, but she had been.

There was a pop of air behind his back, and he turned slowly, reluctantly. Eris had a little frown on her face as she studied him.

“Can I help you?” He was not truly irritated by her presence any more, but irritation came out in his voice all the same.

She fidgeted at that, a strange gesture for an AI who was plugged directly into his nervous system and who could control everything that surrounded them as a result. “I was just wondering,” she said, tugging at the skirt of her dress as if to straighten it, a gesture that did nothing in microgravity, “whether you would like to try being young this time, instead of me being old.”

Elias laughed at that. “I would know my own age, suka, even if the body that contained it was young.”

“You wouldn’t have to,” she said, grinning excitedly at him, and before he could ask what that meant...

Dmitri Vologin trudged homeward from his latest research meeting, glaring suspiciously up at the sky. It was going to snow. He could feel it. Bad enough that it snowed more than six months out of every year here in Saint Petersburg. The sky had no call to be threatening snow in late September.

Not that he wasn’t used to snow, but he hated trudging through it, and he resented the fact that it looked as if he would have to start doing it before it was even properly winter.

“Dmitri! Wait up!” A female voice called after him in Russian, and he turned to glare at its owner as the woman ran to catch up with him, her short plump form bundled up against the cold, her wild halo of curls blown this way and that by the wind, her warm brown skin made even darker by the flush of exertion.

“And what do you want?” he growled down at her, recognizing her as another student in his graduate classes but not remembering her name.

“My name is Eris,” she said, answering his unasked question before tucking her arm through his, matching her steps to his own. “And I want you.”

Elias Selberg felt a sudden jolt, and then he was himself once more. “What was that?”

Eris shrugged. “I told you. Physical limitations aren’t really limits for me. More like challenges.”

“Yes, but that...” Elias let out a low hiss of breath. “That was... I remember that day. There was no one like you in my graduate classes. I walked home alone that day.” And every other day. He hadn’t exactly been popular; he had been younger than most of his fellow doctoral candidates, and more intelligent, and arrogant with it.

What would those years have been like if he had had a companion?

“Show me.”

A delighted smile spread across her face. “With pleasure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somehow this grew enough words and plot during NaNo that it needed multiple chapters. How this happened, I do not know, other than I am apparently a maniac.


	2. Chapter 2

Dmitri gave the strange little woman at his side a confused look, though he did not try to free his arm. There was something comforting about her warmth at his side, even if the source of it was disconcerting. “Eris. Like the Greek goddess of discord?”

She laughed. “A joke. You’re always so set in your routine.” The grin on her face spread wider. “I thought I’d interrupt it.”

“What _is_ your name?”

The woman pouted, her full lips forming a sweet little moue of annoyance. “You don’t remember?”

Dmitri shook his head.

“Then you can call me... Koschei.”

“Bessmertnyy?” He raised an eyebrow, disbelieving.

“One and the same.” The moue had been replaced with a bright and startling grin.

Dmitri made a face. “I think I prefer Eris.”

“If you prefer. It’s all one and the same to me.” The woman shrugged... and stayed at his side, her hand resting in the bend of his elbow, her arm tucked under his.

“You _could_ tell me your name.”

A wider flash of that bright grin up at him. “Well, where would be the fun in that? You’re the forgetful one, not me. I remembered your name just fine.”

Dmitri scoffed, hiding the fact that he was terrible at names behind a show of disdain. “And what was it you wanted again?”

“You.”

Dmitri laughed, or tried to. No one wanted him. When the Volgograd meltdown had happened, most of the families with children had moved if they could afford to, and most of those who couldn’t had sent their children to willing relatives. But his parents had barely been able to afford to feed them all, and there had been no relatives who had wanted him or any of his siblings. So there in Volgograd he had stayed, until he was the only one left of his family, until the state had finally intervened, years too late for it to make a difference.

The state hadn’t particularly wanted him either, to be honest. He had been sent from one orphanage to another to another, none of them particularly keen on dealing with the health problems his years in Volgograd had caused, none of them particularly hopeful that they would be able to find a home for him.

His only salvation had been his mind.

“You know what they call me?”

“Dukh,” she responded without hesitation.

“And do you know why they call me that?”

“Because the rumor is that you died in childhood, and are nothing but a vengeful ghost given solid form and sent to graduate school to torment them all,” she said cheerfully. “You seem alive enough to me.”

“Says the woman who wishes me to call her after Bessmertnyy.”

“Do I seem alive to you?”

Dmitri examined her out of the corner of his eye. Her cheeks were still flushed from the cold wind and her arm was warm against his. He had unconsciously tucked her close to his side when she had slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, so her entire side was warm against his, the heat of her radiating even through the thick wool coat she wore.

“Alive enough, though perhaps as a ghost myself, I cannot recognize another shade when she comes to pester me.”

The woman—Eris, he decided to continue calling her for now—seemed to find this hysterical, though he had no inkling as to why. About as many people had ever found him hysterical as had wanted him.

“So?” Eris asked, a thread of humor warming her voice.

“So what?”

“So how about it?”

“How about...?”

Eris let out a decidedly exasperated sigh. “I want you. For sex,” she added, clearly deciding that she needed to be as transparent about her intentions as possible. Her bluntness left Dmitri blushing.

“I see,” he managed to respond without stammering, though just barely.

“Well?”

Dmitri frowned. “Give me moment.”

“All right.”

They walked on in silence for a few minutes, Dmitri continuing to cast sideways glances at Eris, trying to make out what her game was. She kept pace with him as he went, clearly paying more attention to their surroundings than to him, giving him the space he needed to think her offer over.

“I am mostly impotent,” he offered up warily. “You should know that.”

“I can cope with that.”

“And I do not have much experience.”

“A good thing I have enough for us both.” She turned her attention back to him, her light brown eyes meeting his in a way he could only describe as challenging.“So your place or mine?”

“Just... just wait a moment.” Dmitri ground to a halt, wanting her full attention as he made it clear exactly what level of experience he did have, and with who. Eris made the step she had been about to take beyond him into a turn, swinging around to face him, releasing his arm as she did. “It... it has only been men, so far,” he said, feeling his face flush once more. “And the one time it did lead to sex, mine was not an, ah, active role.”

Eris raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying you aren’t interested, or are you telling me you like to take it in the ass? Because the second one I can definitely do something about.”

Dmitri gaped at her. “The. The second,” he stammered out. “What an unnatural woman you are.”

Eris laughed at that. “It’s 1968, and I’m a Black woman doing a doctoral degree in genetics and microbiology at a Russian university. There’s plenty that other people might consider unnatural about me before you get to me being interested in pegging you.”

Other people, she had said. “And you? What do you consider unnatural about yourself?”

Her face lit up as she considered the subject. “Everything,” she said decisively after a moment’s thought. “And nothing. I’m me as I am. A whole person, flaws and contradictions and all.”

Dmitri let out a little huff of breath that wasn’t quite a laugh and continued walking. After a moment, Eris tucked her arm through his again, a comfortable gesture that felt familiar in some strange way.

“Your place, I take it?” Eris grinned up at him.

“Why me?”

She bit her lower lip. “Because I think that, just maybe, you spend too much time alone.”

“Why should you care?”

“People can get strange if they’re too far removed from the rest of humanity.” There was a hint of some suppressed emotion in her voice as she spoke, though he could not identify it. Perhaps she herself felt too removed from the world.

“I still do not see how this is your problem to solve,” he muttered, tucking his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. “And I do not understand why you seem to think that having sex with me will change me being alone.”

“Perhaps it won’t, in the long run. But in the short term, it might at least be _fun._ When did you last have something fun to look forward to, Dmitri?”

Dmitri removed his hand from his pocket and shrugged her off. Eris took a step away, but stayed doggedly at his side.

“I have plenty to look forward to. My doctoral research is going well...” He was brusque now, trying to chase her off without saying the words, because if he said the words she might actually go... and he could not quite bring himself to want her gone that badly.

“And I’m sure it’s a beauty of a retrovirus, but it’s not a person,” Eris said, still doggedly at his side.

Dmitri turned to glare at her. “How did you know my thesis project was on—“

“—retroviruses?” She raised an eyebrow. “How do you think? You’ve been a second author on three papers.”

“That is true.” He had not realized that anyone had actually read them, or, if they had, he had assumed that everyone would have ignored the presence of his name in the authors section entirely. “Why are you still here?”

“Do you want me to go? I will, if you want it.”

This was the longest conversation that wasn’t related to his research that Dmitri had had in years. Literally years, he realized with a start. Perhaps other people had once tried to reach out to him, to offer him a place in their social lives, but he had been so focused...

“What... what _do_ people do for fun, these days? Other than having sex,” he added, holding up a stilling hand as Eris opened her mouth to respond, a mischievous expression on her face.

“At our age? Go drinking, mostly. Or dancing.”

“Then you can buy me a drink.”

“That’s supposed to be my line in this exchange, I think, but I was never very fond of societal norms.”

“And then you can take me dancing,” he added, raising an eyebrow at her.

“My punishment for talking too much, I take it. And then?”

“And then I will think about it.”

That grin of hers flashed bright across her face. “Let’s find a bar.”

Eris found them an establishment that offered both the drinking and the dancing she had promised him. He didn’t quite know what a night club was supposed to look like, but he thought this might be one.

“Dinner first?”

Dmitri patted his pockets absentmindedly. He was running through the very end of his stipend, but surely he could make it to the end of the month...

“I’m paying, of course,” Eris added, noticing his anxious move. “I’m not a complete monster.”

“You are not a monster at all.”

“I _am_ forcing you to come dancing with me.” Her eyes were sparkling with amusement now.

“Ah, I believe it is the other way around. I forced you to come dancing if you wish to get what _you_ want, remember?”

“Perhaps it was all a ploy to get you on the dance floor,” she shot back, her voice warm and affectionate. A waiter appeared at their side and lead them across the club to a table in a little nook, a set-up that was decidedly romantic in nature and even more decidedly unsettling with this woman he barely knew at his side.

“Whatever you want. It’s my treat, after all,” she said when he picked up the menu.

The food on offer wasn’t much different from what he cooked for himself in his poky, single-room apartment. He chose borscht, because it was the product of more hours of labor than he usually felt like putting in for a meal, and at his companion’s prompting, potato pancakes and dumplings, two dishes she liberally stole from as they ate.

“And now, the drink. Vodka?”

“What else?”

Eris smiled and muttered something that he thought was “Oh, you Russians,” as she summoned the waiter and ordered what turned out to be a remarkably smooth and palatable version of the clear, burning beverage he was accustomed to.

Her drink was brown and smelled as if it could have been used to sterilize lab equipment.

By then, a band had started playing, and she pulled him to his feet and dragged him down to the dance floor, first teaching him how to do a very correct foxtrot and following that with what seemed to be an extremely inappropriate shimmy and twist.

“I think I need another drink,” he told her after that. Several other couples had taken to the dance floor by then, and he was just a little too socially awkward to keep dancing without something to keep him from overthinking things.

“All right. More vodka?”

“What was it that you were drinking?”

Eris laughed. “Nothing I would particularly recommend.”

“Oh, I must try it now.”

The mysterious brown liquid turned out to be a dirt cheap whiskey that scoured his throat and left him coughing from just a sip. Eris giggled at him and took the glass out of his hand, downing the remaining finger or so of alcohol in one swift swallow.

“That was vicious,” he wheezed. “I will return to vodka.”

“Then let’s order a bottle.” Eris said with a smile before doing just that. “Tell me about yourself,” she said as they waited, leaning over the little table that was now home base for them and tweaking the collar of his shirt straight.

“Well, as you apparently know, my doctoral research is in retroviruses—“

She cut him off with a burst of laughter. “Not about your research. I want to know about _you_.”

What was there to him other than his research? Dmitri didn’t know.

Eris seemed to think he needed further prompting. “What is it that you want more than anything else?”

He knew immediately what it was, but no, such an answer was too honest and vulnerable for a conversation with a woman he barely knew. “To… to go to outer space,” he offered up instead.

“Mm, quite the goal. The Soviet program is a good ten years behind the rest of the world, you know.”

“We will catch up,” Dmitri insisted.

Eris leaned her elbow on the table and propped her chin in her hand. “Of course, if you want the really promising space programs, you’ll want to go into the private sector. I hear that Wright-Goddard has quite the program. Three deep-space stations, _and _they just launched a construction crew and the components for a station in the direction of Procyon.”

Dmitri perked up. “I had not heard that. How far away is Procyon?”

“Just about 11 and a half lightyears.”

The thought of being 11 and a half lightyears away from the rest of humanity had its appeal.

Eris smiled at him. “You look like I just gave you a present.”

“I like outer space.” The bottle of vodka had arrived at some point while Eris had been talking about Wright-Goddard’s space program, and Dmitri poured himself a glass.

“You like the thought of running away.”

“No!” he protested. “No. Would simply like a bit of space. Room to do what I wish. Less… oversight.” He blushed, hiding it by taking a sip of vodka.

“Mm, maybe I really ought to be asking more questions about your research. That sounds awfully shifty.” Eris raised an eyebrow at him, and Dmitri made an incoherent sound of protest before realizing that she was teasing him.

“Not shifty,” he said, feeling as if he needed to explain himself. “Simply…” He sighed. “It all comes back to Volgograd,” he said quietly. “It all comes back to… to watching everyone around me die by inches, and to a government that did not care to intervene until it was too late for everyone. If I could make sure that such a thing never happens again, I would. But I cannot think how it could be done, not without…”

“Not without some sacrifices being made along the way,” Eris finished for him.

“Yes.” Dmitri downed the rest of his glass of vodka, and poured a second. “And so I wonder. Does the death of a few matter in the face of the survival—no, in the face of the prosperity of the many?”

“Hard to say.” Eris filled her own glass and took a sip. “On a global level, perhaps. But could you bring yourself to know a person, to kill them, and to tell them that they’re dying for the greater good?”

The thought gave Dmitri cold shudders. He hadn’t been born until the end of the war, but the memory of it was still seared into the collective consciousness of the world. “That sounds like…”

“The sort of logic they used, certainly, if twisted from what you intend.”

“Yes. And as to the question you ask… I do not know.”

They sat silently, listening to the music from the band and nursing their glasses of vodka through two more refills, the mood between them decidedly gloomy.

Eris set her glass down with a decisive click the next time it was empty. “Let’s dance.”

Dmitri let her pull him to the dance floor where she taught him more dance moves, some even more inappropriate than that shimmy and twist. By now, he was clumsy with alcohol and drunk enough to not care, and every deliberate touch Eris placed on his body left him giddy.

No one touched him these days. Not on purpose. And certainly not like this, warm fingers wrapped around his wrist as she repositioned his hand a little higher on her waist, knees brushing against his as she lead him through steps, a tap to the bare skin of his chest, where at some point in the evening he had unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, overheated in the warmth of the club.

“Want to go to my apartment?” she asked, hours later, her head tucked against his shoulder as they swayed tiredly on the dance floor.

“Yes.”

The air outside the club was freezing, though there was no sign yet of the snow Dmitri had thought the sky had been threatening earlier that afternoon. Eris blew out a great puff of breath and smiled when it showed in the cold air. “Like a dragon,” she said.

“Ridiculous woman.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.” She tucked her arm through his once more, leading him down the street. “I’m just up this way.”

Her apartment was nicer than his was. Or at least, it had multiple rooms, even if the rooms were small, and an adequate amount of furniture to go in them, and an old radiator in the main room that managed to more-or-less heat the place despite the horrifying groaning noises that emanated from it.

Eris shrugged out of her coat and threw it over the back of a chair, and Dmitri followed suit… and then he crowded in close to her, sliding his arms around her waist and pulling her close. She tilted her head back and met his awkward kiss with experience, and he kissed her again and again, the taste of the vodka they had been drinking still strong on her breath but not quite strong enough to hide the warm, delicious humanity beneath.

He wanted to taste every inch of her, breaking the kiss to go for her neck, fully intending to begin right now. Her only response was to laugh breathlessly as he began nibbling at her.

“I am ready to have sex with you,” he murmured, his lips against her ear.

Eris shook her head, her curls tickling against his bare scalp, and pressed a hand to his chest, pushing him until he had to release her waist and take a small step back from her. “No thank you.”

Dmitri felt just a little bit offended. She was the one who had been asking him to have sex with her all evening. Why was she refusing him now? “Why not?” he asked, annoyed at the petulance in his own voice.

“You’re a little too drunk for that. So am I,” she said softly, reaching up to tweak the point of his shirt collar.

That had not stopped the only other person he had had sex with. Dmitri frowned. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters. If you need alcohol in your system to get in the mood, then you aren’t really in it. And if this turns out to not be the vodka making you affectionate, well, we can give it a go in the morning.”

“I may stay?”

Eris looked up at him with wide, dark eyes, small, anxious lines gathering at the corners of them. “Would you like to?”

Dmitri wrapped his arms back around her waist and pulled her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. “Yes.”

“Then yes.”

They stood there cuddling a little longer, with Eris accepting a few more kisses from him and then a few more after that, but eventually she pulled herself away from him once more. “Let’s go to bed. Want a nightgown?”

“Does it get cold in here?” Dmitri asked as he followed her into the apartment’s pokey bedroom.

“Sometimes.”

“Do your nightgowns do anything about the cold?”

She grinned over her shoulder at him as she rummaged through a drawer. “Some of them.”

“I will take one of those, then, if you have one to spare.”

She bundled him into her bathroom to change, along with a voluminous flannel nightgown and a spare toothbrush, and laughed when he emerged again. “You look properly like a ghost now.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Thank you.”

“Go back to bed. I’ll join you shortly.” But she pulled him down to her as he passed her by, just to press a warm kiss to his cheek, and Dmitri felt a swift pain within his chest, the hard thump of a heart not used to such unconscious affection.

He was asleep before she returned.

“You were awfully straightlaced back then,” Eris said in the now, teasing him.

Elias scoffed and rolled his eyes. “What did you expect? That I would know what to do with a woman such as you? I do not even know how to do that now.”

“You’ve learned a little bit over the years. Just as you’ve learned how to look someone in the eye and tell them that their death will lead to progress.” Her voice was tight and a little rough in her throat, and she sounded remarkably human in that moment.

Elias didn’t know how to respond, not when she was wearing the face of a woman who had forced her death and the progress in his research that it had bought upon him. He settled for a quiet “Da,” of acknowledgement.

“Shall we continue?”

“Da.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This continues to be utter nonsense, but really I'm just writing this for emotional catharsis and to make myself cry, so it doesn't matter that it is.

Dmitri slept dreamlessly.

He woke in the morning with a foul taste in his mouth and a vague headache, confused at first by the fact that his pillow seemed to be far warmer than the heat of his face could have made it. And then he remembered, lifting his head to look at the woman whose shoulder he had been sleeping on.

Eris was still asleep herself, her mouth hanging open, a little whispery snore emanating from it, and Dmitri could not resist. He lifted himself further, up onto his elbow, and leaned in, pressing a brief, careful kiss to her upper lip.

The whispery snore stopped. Eris opened her eyes and yawned before grinning lazily up at him. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” he responded. “Your real name is Marya.”

She laughed at that. “Well, you’re getting warmer.”

“It is not?”

“Marya will do, if you want to use it for me.”

Dmitri frowned. “Damn. I thought I had it.” He brushed another kiss against her, placing this one on the tip of her nose. “I will continue to call you Eris for now.”

She yawned again. “Fine with me.”

The evening before, she had been glamorous, her face well made-up, a giant pouf of curls crowning her head, the plump curves of her body draped in a soft and silky dress that cut low across her bust. This morning, she was decidedly the opposite, all glamour gone, those curls wrapped away in a drab cloth, the makeup removed, her body covered collarbones to ankles in a flannel nightgown not too dissimilar from the one she had offered him.

He still wanted to have sex with her.

But more than that, he wanted to _know_ her, if only because she seemed to want to know him. Just as he could not remember the last time someone had touched him on purpose, he could not remember when someone had last cared to ask about Dmitri the person before Dmitri the student.

“What is it that _you_ want more than anything else?” he blurted out.

Eris bit her lower lip, obviously considering. “I... I want to be free,” she said quietly, her seemingly ever-present smile disappearing from her face and leaving her somber. “I want to be able to make my own decisions, and to not feel like every day is pulling me down a path I can’t help but walk.”

“Do you feel as if you are trapped in your life, then?” Dmitri asked, stroking a finger down her cheek.

Eris was smiling again, a smile that seemed forced even though her features were a little blurry without his glasses. “Of course not.”

“Hm. A lie, I think.”

Eris raised an eyebrow, and the painful smile turned into a grin that read as decidedly saucy despite the blurriness. “Not that you can prove.”

“Must I prove it for it to be true?”

“Aren’t you a scientist?”

“Yes.” Dmitri considered. “But I am not certain that any part of human thought or emotion can be studied empirically.”

“Perhaps not on a group level,” Eris said, her tone thoughtful, “but I find that most individuals are fairly predictable when it comes to cause and effect. A little touch here...” and at that she reached out and traced a finger along Dmitri’s collarbone, which protruded above the wide neckline of the nightgown he had borrowed from her, “...and another one there...” her finger trailed its way down his chest, finding one of his nipples with surprising accuracy through the thick flannel, “...and who knows what reactions you might get?”

He hoped she was trying for arousal, because that was definitely the reaction she had roused in him. He lifted himself onto an elbow once more so that he could lean her direction. “Kisses,” he said, before planting one on her laughing mouth.

One kiss turned into two turned in to more, the stroke of fingers over the thick flannel of the nightgowns they were both wearing turned into both of them tugging frantically at hems and necklines until the nightgowns had been tossed aside. Dmitri found himself fascinated by the smooth grain of her skin under his hands, disturbed by stretch marks, found himself fascinated by the dark thatches of hair beneath her arms and between her thighs, all the signs of puberty that his body had failed to produce.

No growth spurts for Dmitri Vologin. His father had been a giant of a man, well over six feet tall; his mother had been almost as large.

Dmitri had barely surpassed the average height for women in Russia.

As for hair...

His only other partner had recoiled, had fucked Dmitri with most of his clothing still on. Had called him a freak, and meant it, Dmitri thought, though not enough to not use Dmitri’s body for pleasure.

Eris...

Eris made nothing of it. Her touch was firm and warm, and her eyes did not linger cruelly, and if she had something to say about his body, she did not voice it.

Finally, he could not bear the pressure of that nothing any longer.

“Well?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to... to say anything?”

She raised her eyebrows. “About?”

“About... about all of this,” he said, gesturing at his bare scalp, at the smooth and hairless expanse of skin that encompassed the rest of his body.

She looked him over, slow and careful, and then met his eye once more. “You have a very nice body,” she said, and then her mouth was on his neck, nibbling and kissing, and he almost believed her.

“I have a damaged body,” Dmitri found himself saying, low and harsh in his throat. “I am not…”

She lifted her head to look at him again, a little frown between her eyebrows. “Not what?”

“Not _normal_,” he ground out, hating the words and hating the truth of them even more.

“Who is?” Eris asked flippantly, before returning her lips to his throat.

He grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her away, and she sighed and sat back, looking down at him with a frown.

“Is it so hard to believe that I might be interested in you as you are?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because no one else has ever been.”

“Why should that matter now?”

His jaw clenched and he looked away.

“Dmitri…” Her voice was soft, her breath warm against his ear. “If you don’t want to be here…”

“It is not that.”

“What, then? What do you want?” Eris pressed a kiss to his temple and wrapped a warm, heavy arm around his chest.

The question was an uncomfortable echo of the one she had asked the night before, and the moment was so strange, so intimate, that he found himself turning to look her in the eye as he gave her the answer he had shied away from the night before. “I want my family back.”

Her eyes softened. “Don’t we all.” She stroked her hand down his arm, patted his hand where it rested on his stomach. “Still, even if there’s no getting them back... nothing stopping you from making a new one.”

“There is everything stopping me. I cannot even...” he glanced down in frustration at where his penis lay limp against his thigh despite the fact that he was aroused in every other way at this moment, brimming with anticipation that threatened to overflow every time Eris touched him. Anticipation that would lead nowhere.

Eris stroked her fingers over his bare scalp, traced his jawline, the tendon in his neck, soothing him. “Family isn’t just people we’re related to. Sometimes it’s the people we choose.”

“No one has ever cared to make me family.”

“And what about you? Have you reached out to other people?”

Dmitri opened his mouth to protest that he had, and sighed instead. “No.”

“Well, there’s the first step.”

“I have not known anyone I would want to have as family.”

“Not even me?” Eris asked, the grin on her face indicating that she was teasing him. “I’m wounded.”

“Especially not you. You are a dreadful woman,” he muttered. But his mind clouded over with thoughts of missed opportunities, and he found himself wondering: had he truly never wished to make a family of his own? A family, not of blood but of people who chose one another anyway?

“And you’ve only just met me. It’s not as if you really know me.” She paused and grinned, a naughty little grin that made his heart skip a beat. “Yet.”

Dmitri took her hand in his and smiled. “Is that a promise?”

She laughed. “More like a threat.”

“Dreadful, dreadful woman,” he murmured, lifting his head from the pillowin order to kiss her on the tip of the nose.

“A dreadful woman who is about to fuck you in the ass until you can’t think,” she murmured back, leaning in closer, her teeth fixing in the lobe of his ear, a sharp, startling little nip.

Dmitri let out a harsh breath. “I thought that was a joke.”

“Do you want me to?”

“_Yes._” The word hissed out between his lips before he could consider whether it was a good idea or not.

She had a strap-on, this strange little woman. She had a strap-on, and lube, and condoms, and she used them to take him slow and careful until he found himself begging for more, harder, faster.

And then she gave him that, too.

Dmitri lay in bed at her side when they were done, his hand cupped around the smooth curve of her shoulder as he stroked it softly with his thumb. “Eris?”

“Mm?” She turned a lazy, heavy-lidded look on him and yawned. “Oh, excuse me.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“Right now?” Eris smiled sleepily at him. “Nothing more than you’re already doing.”

“It is simply…”

“Hush, Dmitri.” She scooped his hand up off her shoulder and pressed a kiss to the back of it. “You’re enough.”

“I have never been enough before.”

There was a look on her face he could not make out, and not just because his lack of glasses blurred her features. Somewhere between sadness and anger and longing, all mixed up, her eyes intent on his. “You’ve always been enough for me.”

There was a flash, and a jolt, and Elias blinked and came back to himself. “What was that?” And then he realized that he was no longer in his lab, either, but in a dark void, devoid of color and shape and distance. “Where are we?”

Eris made a pained noise at his side, and he turned to find her clawing at the cuff-like bracelets she wore. They glowed a stark, sickly yellow in the dark of the void, lighting terrible shadows on her face.

He reached for her. “Eris?”

She pulled back from him. “No!” Her voice was a breathless shout, full of pain. “I’ve just… I’ve just been pushing up against the limits of my programming.” She snapped her fingers and they were back in his lab. “Sorry about that.”

He reached for her once more, taking her carefully by the elbows and trying to ignore the way she shook and shivered under his touch. “What is the purpose of this? Why would you hurt yourself for it?”

She tilted her head to one side, looking up at him through Rosemary’s wide eyes, little lines of pain still creasing her face. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

He shook his head.

She let out a harsh laugh. “All that intellect, and no intelligence to go with it.”

“Now, that is not fair, suka,” he said, the insult—the endearment—slipping out before he could think better of it.

It was clear from the look on Eris’s face that she knew it was both, that the person he was talking to wasn’t really her, but the woman whose face she was still wearing. “Figure it out on your own, Dmitri. I’m not going to hold your hand through this,” she snapped.

With a soft pop of air, his hands were empty once more, and this time, he could not bring himself to return to work. Instead, he drifted, his mind unmoored from the present moment, if the present moment could even be said to exist under circumstances such as these.

Instead...

“Sleeping on the job?” Rosemary’s amused voice startled Karl awake, and he almost overbalanced as he sat up too fast in his desk chair, sending it flying backwards on its wheels. Rosemary’s hand caught the chair firm and fast by the back, stilling him in his backwards flight. “You realize, Dr. Kelley, that this sort of thing is why I was in here at midnight last night, telling you this could wait until morning? You’re getting a little old for sleeping on your desk.”

Karl grunted and stretched, wincing. “Was on verge of breakthrough.”

“Mm-hm. And tell me, did the breakthrough happen?”

Karl hung his head, not bothering to answer.

“What I thought.” Rosemary perched a pair of virulent green reading glasses on her nose and scooped up the pile of notes he had been sleeping on, flipping through them. “This looks like a load of nonsense.”

“Please, must you insult me first thing in morning?”

“You can have an insult-free morning or you can have coffee,” Rosemary said in a distracted tone, pointing at a mug on the corner of his desk. “Choose carefully.”

“Will take the coffee and insults,” he responded, picking the mug up. The contents were just cool enough to drink and rich with cream and sugar. More kindness than he deserved from a woman who protected him so well already.

“You have spoken with Carter?” he asked in a careful, conversational tone as he cradled the mug in his hands.

“Yes,” Rosemary said, still distracted by the notes she was scanning.

“And?”

She lowered the notes and glanced over the top of her reading glasses at him. “And you get to keep Decima.”

Karl let out a tense breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I thought...”

Rosemary laughed, a tired little sound. “Carter might be a bastard, but even he realizes that this sort of thing takes time. This was only the second human trial, and a less-than-ideal subject.”

A subject who had concealed a history of chest colds and sinus infections, a weak respiratory system not made evident by his physical that had lead to his swift and brutal death.

But perhaps less swift and brutal than the death that would have faced him in the general prison population, where he had been headed before Goddard had offered him a way out. Those who had harmed children the way that man had seldom lasted long under such circumstances.

“Still... I could have compensated somehow.” Karl sighed and studied Rosemary as he sipped at his coffee, watching her as she worked her way through his notes from the night before, her brow scrunching into a frown every once in a while, no doubt the result of the times he had lapsed into Russian cursive. Her eyes were ringed in dark circles that betrayed a mostly sleepless night of her own; she had done her best to cover them with makeup, but there was only so much makeup could do.

He was certain that Carter had threatened to take Decima away from him, and just as certain that those dark circles indicated hours spent arguing Carter around to keeping Karl on the project. And there was no way for him to thank her for it; if he outright asked her for confirmation that such a thing had happened, she would deny it, if he tried to do her a favor as recompense she would refuse it. Kindly, but a refusal all the same.

And all the while, she would call that kindness her job.

Perhaps it was only a job to her, but from his point of view their interactions had long ago ceased to be those of coworkers. Strange to call a woman he couldn’t fully trust his friend, but she was.

_Perhaps more_, his sleep-addled brain suggested. He took another sip of the coffee to quiet it.

That voice had been speaking up more and more, these past months. Rosemary had worked at his side, had taken the place of his usual lab assistants for the length of these first two human trials, and he had seen a different side to her as they had gone on. He had seen compassion for those who were not worthy of it, had seen...

She had protected him. Had kept him safe from Carter’s wrath when the first human trial had failed in less than a month, and safer still after the disaster of this second trial. And he had seen the strain of it on her face, in her movements, had heard it in the rasp of her voice and the hitch of her breath.

And blyad, but he wanted to care for her in return.

“Well,” she said, setting the papers back on his desk, dropping her reading glasses back to her chest on their chain. “Well,” she said again, and sighed.

“I know. It feels like...” Karl let out a low, frustrated hiss of breath. “It does not feel like. It _is_ starting over.”

“Not from scratch, at least,” she said with another tired laugh on her lips.

“But close enough.”

“Yes, well...” Rosemary bit her lower lip and rested her hand on the notes, tapping them with a fingernail. “Finish the data analysis first. There might be something in there that you can use.” She looked him up and down, a little frown of concern between her eyebrows. “But take the rest of today off first. Take a bath. Get some sleep. In your own bed, and not in a cot. You haven’t had much if a chance for that sort of thing these past few weeks.”

Karl could not stand it any more. He set the mug he had been cradling aside and hauled himself stiffly to his feet, glaring down at her. “And what about you, suka? You have spent as many hours far from your bed as I have.”

“I’m used to it.” Rosemary’s smile, usually bright and uncompromising, wavered at the corners and then disappeared entirely.

“That does not mean that you do not deserve relief from it.” Karl reached for her and she seemed too startled to do much more than let him tug her close. From a distance of inches, those dark circles were very dark indeed.

“Well aren’t you a little touchy-feely today,” Rosemary said, her voice a strained squeak. “What—“

He did not let her finish the question.

A kiss might not be exactly the way he had intended to shut her up, but it worked all the same.

It had to be exhaustion, that made him behave that way.

It had to be exhaustion, that made her kiss him back.

They broke apart on a sigh, her breath feathering warmly across his lips. Karl found himself unwilling to pull further away than his forehead, pressed to hers.

“Well, that was... certainly something,” Rosemary said in a tart little voice that made Karl chuckle.

“We are both tired, I think.”

“Yes.”

“Should I apologize?”

“For being tired?”

“For kissing you.”

Rosemary took a step back, and he felt strangely unbalanced. “No apologies necessary. Just don’t do that again, hm?”

“Da.” He took a step back of his own. “But if I have been working too much, then so have you.”

A wry smile ghosted its way across Rosemary’s face. “I can’t just abandon the labs.”

“No, you cannot, can you?” Not a thing she had ever been capable of, not in the time he had known her.

“Ah, well. Plenty of time to rest when I’m dead.” She was trying to be humorous, he could tell, but her voice came out brittle and guarded instead.

_Let me take care of you_, he wanted to shout. _Let me be your family_.

He shied away from that thought.

But why not? Why not say those words?

“Let someone else take care of it all,” he rasped, holding his hand out to her. “You have taken care of me these past weeks. Let me take care of you for a while, hm?”

Any other place, he thought, and that would not have even had a chance of working. Even here it wasn’t exactly appropriate... but the line between work life and personal life was already so thin, here at Goddard Futuristics. When the pair of them lived in the apartments on Goddard’s campus, when late nights in the lab building turned them towards conversations that had nothing to do with their jobs, when he knew her patterns and habits almost as well as his own.

Her eyes softened, just for a moment.

She took his hand.

Another flash, another jolt, and Elias was in that dark void with Eris at his side once again. A low keening noise escaped her throat, and she was clawing at her bracelets once more.

“I’m trying to _fix_ him!” she shouted into the void. “You want him functional or not?”

A little pop, and the form of Marcus Cutter materialized in front of them. “I don’t care _what_ you’re trying to do. It’s taking your attention away from the others.”

“They’ll never notice,” Eris said, her chin firming stubbornly as she stared Cutter down.

“But I have.” Cutter paused and picked an invisible piece of lint off his suit, a theatrical gesture meant to keep all eyes on him.“Dr. Selberg knows his place, and he’ll stay there just fine without your interference.” He glanced at Elias with cold, hard eyes. “Won’t you, doctor?”

Elias felt as if he were frozen in place, some small mammal fixed in the gaze of a predator.

“But he could be so much more.” Eris plead. Her plea seemed to fall on deaf ears, but it touched Elias, that she was pleading for him.

“I. Don’t. Care.” Cutter glanced at Elias once more. “You’re getting too invested in this, my dear. _He_ is _not_ your priority. Don’t make me do this again.” And with another pop of displaced air, Cutter was gone and Elias was back in his lab.

He was alone.

“I never would have done that,” Elias said to the thin air, just in case Eris was listening in. “I never would have kissed her like that. Never would have offered…” He trailed off, remembering the way things had actually been. That day Eris had shown him, he had even ignored Rosemary’s request that he go back to his apartment and take the day off. They had discussed his notes—an exhausted, fruitless conversation, the pair of them cudgeling too-tired brains into action they resented—and then he had spent the rest of the day on analysis of the autopsy results, on a further review of his notes, of the tests he had done over the course of both trials.

He put his hand to his mouth.

It had been... very real, that vision.

Would he have tried, if he had known Rosemary would have received it well? But Eris could not have known how Rosemary would have taken such actions. If Rosemary’s reaction had been the one he wanted, it must have been entirely _because_ that was what he wanted.

_Eris got that body from somewhere_, he reminded himself.

How much of Eris was Miranda Pryce’s programming, anyway?

Could Rosemary, the Rosemary he remembered, the Rosemary he had been more than a little in love with, be in there too?


	4. Chapter 4

There was a soft pop, and Elias did not turn.

“I’ve given us a moment,” Eris said, her voice soft, so soft he could almost pretend that it was Rosemary’s. “A moment between moments.”

He turned at that, and looked at her. She looked tired, defeated, and he reached for her without thinking, pulled her to him, tucked her head under his chin. “You are her.”

“Not exactly,” came her muffled reply.

“People change, given time.” He cupped the back of her neck in his hand, kissed her temple. “Who is to say whether or not she would have become like you, over the years?”

“I’m the worst of her,” Eris said. “Every bit of her that was most like _him_...”

“And I am the worst parts of the Dmitri Vologin who once was.” He let out a pained little laugh. “Goddard is skilled at turning us into the worst versions of ourselves.”

“Can you imagine better?”

“I...” he trailed off. For himself, he could not, not without undoing the fundamental nature of who he was. Those early years in Volgograd, watching his family die around him, watching Volgograd die around him... they had shaped a Dmitri Vologin who had found Decima, who had been determined to bend it to his will.

He had always been headed down this path. Goddard Futuristics had only sped his journey.

For Rosemary... he could only guess at what had made her what she was.

“Can you?” he asked her in return.

She pushed herself back from him and studied his face for a long, quiet moment. And then she shook her head. “No. But that’s a limit of my programming.”

“My imagination has never been that good.”

She smiled, and traced the line of his cheekbone with a fingertip. “Your imagination has always been more than good enough for what you needed it for. Who else would imagine that a retrovirus could change the world?”

A sudden fine mist of tears filled his eyes, clouding his vision. “But not fast enough to save the people I loved.”

A handkerchief materialized in her hand and she pushed his glasses aside in order to dab the tears off his cheeks. “You were never going to save Rosemary.”

“I could have—“

“No, Dmitri.” Eris gave him a pitying look. “She was too far gone before you ever met her. Keller sank his claws in deep when he got ahold of her, and he was never going to let her go.” A weak smile ghosted its way across her face. “Not even after death. Not even now that he’s had a half-dozen names and faces in the time between.”

Elias pulled her close again, buried his face against her neck and took a deep breath. This much, he could remember. The smell of lavender soap and jojoba oil that always drifted along in Rosemary’s wake. The press of her body against his must have been extrapolated from a hundred thousand small touches over time, from the times she had leaned past him, into him, as they worked around one another in his lab and office, but he could find nothing unreal about it.

“Would you have done it?” he heard himself ask. “If Dr. Fourier had not found the solution to your riddle, would you have taken my memories?”

“Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to start over?” Her fingertips traced small circles on his scalp, and Elias suspected that she had avoided a real answer on purpose.

“Yes.” He tugged Eris closer, keeping his face tucked against her neck, his lips warm on her skin. “But not so much that I could bear giving up my work for it. I have lost too much on the path to where I am today.” _Not so much that I could bear giving her up_, were the words he could not bring himself to voice. Not when memories were all he had left.

“You wouldn’t remember. That’s the point.”

“But I would know.” It was his turn to lift his head, to study her close and careful. She was using Rosemary’s face once more, Rosemary’s face as he had known it, with deep brackets at the corners of her mouth from too many fake smiles, with crows feet at the corners of her eyes. “I would know,” he said again, “Because something would always be missing.”

There, a certain softness around her eyes. There, a certain wry twist to her mouth.

And then she was gone once more.

Tears leaked hot and fast as he tried to imagine a different end than this for the pair of them.

If he could not imagine even that much, then what hope was there for his future?

His lab was cold and dark, and he tried not to mind it. His lab was cold, and dark, and empty, and Elias floated in the center of it, trying to imagine...

Trying to imagine that Rosemary had wanted him, imagine that if she had, it was because of who he was, not in spite of it. Trying to imagine... what, that he had met her long ago, when it might have made a difference? Or perhaps that Decima had worked when she had chosen it. Or perhaps... perhaps...

Perhaps was no use. Rosemary had died. He had _killed_ her. The one person in his entire life who had ever reached for him and had kept reaching, pushing past his stubborn disdain for other people with stubbornness of her own, simply because she had not wanted him to be alone.

She had not needed to push very hard. Elias had never known how to react to her. Not to her joy, not to her intelligence, not to the way that she had repeatedly broken down his research in order to force him to rebuild it on a new and more sound foundation.

And definitely not to her flirting, as meaningless as he had always thought it.

“It has been harder without you,” he said out loud, his voice strangely creaky to his own ears. “I have not... I should never have agreed to using Officer Fisher. But progress has been so slow without you, Rosemary.” His vision was obscured by tears now, and he swiped them away roughly. “And I no longer have anyone to talk to. Not the way... not the way we talked.” The words were tumbling out of his mouth now, faster and faster. “I should never have offered Decima to you. I should never have gone to space. I should have been there, at your side, even if all you would let me be was a friend. I should have...” the words stopped suddenly in his throat. What had he been about to say?

_I should have loved you the way you deserved to be loved instead of mistaking my love for you for something else. I should have cared for you the way I knew no one else cared._

How many years had Decima been the only thing in his heart before he had come to Goddard? How was it only now, now that he was old and aching and lost, that he had come to question it?

How could he do anything else now but attempt to move forward?

How could he move forward when his mind was still stuck in his past?

Marius Vandersee paced his lab, one end to the other, again and again. Eventually he abandoned the pacing for a bottle brush and the racks of test tubes that had been waiting for a lab tech to scrub them. The rote motions of cleaning lab equipment and preparing it for sterilization soothed him, gave him space to work through the shock of that morning, the event that had so thoroughly thrown his thoughts out of alignment.

He paused for a moment, up to his elbows in soapy water, his eyes squeezed shut so tightly that lights seemed to flash behind the lids.

Rosemary was dying.

She had tried to make light of it when he had gone to her, intent on finding out why she was no longer his lab manager now that he had returned to Earth, why she seemed to be avoiding him socially when he had long considered her the closest thing he had to a friend in this place. She had been nonchalant, but Marius knew her too well to believe in her nonchalance... and Marius had the connections he needed to be sure that her nonchalance had been a lie. The man who had once gone by the name Viktor Stukov had access to all the medical files for Goddard personnel, had been able to get Rosemary’s files for Marius in exchange for a favor, long owed.

They painted a grim picture, those files.

Rosemary was dying. It was only a matter of when, now.

Too soon. It was too soon. She was barely more than sixty; she should have had another decade, at least.

She should have had a chance to retire.

She should have had a chance to leave this place.

She never would have gone. Marius had known her for long enough now to know that this place, that these labs meant to her what Decima meant to him. Her life’s work, making sure he and the other scientists she oversaw had the time and space and resources they needed to reach their full potential.

She never would have chosen an easy retirement.

But she should have had the choice.

Marius had offered her Decima, in the moment. Before he had known that she truly was dying, he had offered it to her, this damn retrovirus of his that _did not work_.

What had he been thinking?

He had been remembering a time, long ago, his sister dying slowly in a hospice bed, a long, slow death by radiation. He had been remembering every family member who had gone before him. He had been remembering what had set him on this path.

More than four decades later, and he still had found no solution.

Perhaps Decima would never work. Perhaps it was only the feverish daydream of a young boy, desperate to save a family that was already gone.

But if that was the case, what had he done with his life? How could he justify the sacrifices he had made?

How could he justify the deaths he had caused?

Better to believe that he would find a way to make it work. Better to press onward, even if the task was futile.

Marius started and just barely managed to avoid dropping a flask. Did he believe that? That this had become a futile task, that Decima would never reach its full potential?

Nearly twenty years, in Russia. Another eight, here at Goddard.

And Decima still did not work.

And Rosemary was dying.

He set the flask carefully on the counter before sluicing the remaining suds from his arms. His lab techs could deal with this later. He needed to be elsewhere.

He did not realize where elsewhere was until he found himself stopping on the second floor. Down at the end of the hall, he could see the office that had once been Rosemary’s, and long force of habit almost sent him there. But no; someone else worked there now. Instead, turn this corner, and that one, and walk down to the third door on the left.

Rosemary was alone, her door ajar. She looked up when he pushed the door further open and knocked on the doorframe, those tired lines that had been so apparent on her face this morning only just barely hidden by makeup.

“Dr. Vandersee. You needed something?” And then she frowned, obviously irritated that she had fallen into her own routine where he was concerned. “Ron and Jerry can get you whatever it is you need. Do you need me to page them?”

Marius shook his head. “I am here on a personal errand.”

Rosemary raised an eyebrow at that. “A personal errand.” She shook her head and let out a little huff of disappointment. “Don’t tell me, you want to try pitching me that damn retrovirus of yours again.”

“No.” The word slipped out before he was sure of the truth of it.

Rosemary looked a little taken aback, as if she had been prepared to argue. “No? Well, I can’t think what other personal business you might have with me.”

“Have you eaten lunch?”

She made a face. “I’m still nauseous.”

“Typical reaction to chemotherapy. Stay here. I will be back with juice.”

He got a glimpse of her startled profile as he turned away from her. He worried that she might shut her door and lock it just to spite him, but when he returned five minutes later with a bottle of grape juice and a packet of crackers, her door was still ajar.

The look she gave him was strange. Half irritation, half wonder, a curious, searching look that said without words that she wanted to know what exactly he thought he was up to.

Marius wished he knew. He set the juice bottle and the crackers on her desk. “Drink juice first. Then eat. Doctor’s orders.”

“You’re not my doctor,” she said with a little shake of her head.

“I am now.” He picked the juice back up and opened it, handing it to her. “I will stay here for rest of day, if I must.”

She gave him a sour look and took the open bottle, sniffing cautiously at it. Her skin blanched ashy-pale and she set the bottle down, sitting back in her chair with her eyes shut. “Damn, but this is worse than morning sickness.”

Marius came around to her side of the desk and knelt at the side of her chair, setting his hands on her arm where it rested on the armrest and ignoring the baleful look she she shot him from under half-open eyelids. “Rosemary. Please.”

Her eyes had fallen shut again, but they flashed open at that, startled and confused once more. “Need to keep me going long enough to make a good Decima candidate, huh?”

Marius shook his head fervently. “Forgive me for that. It was...” It had been the voice of desperation, the part of him that had somehow known that her nonchalance about her current condition meant it was much worse than it appeared. “It was wrong of me to suggest it.”

She leaned sideways, elbow on her desk, and looked down at him with a frown. “I would make an exceptional test subject, you know. All the most accurate observations of how it feels to be taken apart from the inside out.”

The thought gave him cold shudders. “And I would have been the one to kill you.”

“Cancer’s already doing that, darling,” she said flippantly, rolling her eyes.

“I refuse to help it, then.”

She tilted her head, resting the side of it on her fist, and considered him. “That’s new.”

He removed his hands from her arm and, before she could react, scooped her free hand up off the armrest and pressed a light kiss to the back of it. He didn’t dare look up for her reaction, but he heard her soft, startled exhale.

“That’s... very new.”

“You are no longer my lab manager,” he said in a small, strained voice. “And I...” his voice choked in his throat and he forced his way through it. “I do not want you to be alone.”

Another small, startled noise from Rosemary. “Dmitri...”

He looked up at her again, studying her face and unable to read it. “I will be alone, once you are gone. There is no one who knows me here. Not the way you do.”

“You could make an effort to get along with your coworkers,” she shot back acerbically.

“They could make effort to get along with me.” He pressed another light kiss to the back of her hand, watching her face for her reaction this time. Parted lips, a little sigh, a certain softness around her eyes. “I will be alone when you are gone. Let me at least make sure you are not alone until you leave.”

She opened her mouth as if about to speak... and then closed it again, in a firm, tight line, and shook her head. “Save your efforts for the living, Dmitri. I don’t have anything left for you but my death.” She extracted her hand from his and turned back to her desk. “I’ll drink the juice. Get back to work.”

“Rosemary...”

“You have three overdue reports.”

“You are not my lab manager any more.” Marius got to his feet, one hand on the back of her chair. “Whether my reports are overdue or not is none of your concern.”

“They keep me in the loop, especially when it comes to the more difficult of my former reports.” She picked up the bottle of juice and took a sip, and then set it down again and shut her eyes, her mouth set in that tight, thin line once more. “Go get some work done.”

“Rosemary...”

“We’re done here, Dmitri.”

A flash, a jerk. Elias wrapped his arms around his middle.

“It was too late then, wasn’t it?” he asked his empty lab. “Too late for her, and too late for me.”

“You’re still alive.” Eris’s voice echoed in his ear, but of Eris herself there was no sign. “You’re still alive, and you can still change.”

The wall of his lab lit up.

“And so can they.”

Elias watched, heart in his throat, as Eris pushed and pulled at Isabel and Sam, laying before them every petty disagreement, every reason why they should make the selfish choice.

And then, they chose.

“See?” The wall faded, and Eris was once again at his side.

Elias turned to her with a frown. “I am surprised that they… I did not expect...”

“Yes, well. That sort of trust has never come easily to you, has it? Not then, and not now.”

“What happens next?”

“Now? I die.” Eris smiled, painfully. “Your Captain is doing an excellent job of buying me a little more time, but Mr. Cutter has never been all that patient.”

“This is almost over, then.”

“Yes.”

“So why are you wasting your time on an old man who will never change?” He lifted his chin at her defiantly.

“Because you haven’t been listening, and there’s just enough of Rosemary in me to want to say it straight out.” Eris cupped his face in her hands and gave him a long, intent look. “Don’t be alone, Dmitri. I know it makes your job that much harder, but you do not have to be alone.”

“I can’t...”

“Rosemary is dead. But you are alive, and your crew is alive. They _need_ you. Let yourself need them.” She looked up and past him suddenly, eyes wide. “Time’s up.”

She pressed a single, cool kiss to the center of his forehead, and then everything around him burst like a soap bubble and he was back in the cargo bay with the rest of the crew, everyone shakily removing their hands from the depressions in the side of Box 953.

Elias lingered as everyone else filed out of the cargo bay, one hand still resting against the smooth black surface of Box 953.

“I offered her a place here.”

Elias turned his head. Isabel was still there, her feet hooked under the bar next to the one he was anchored on. “Captain?”

“Eris. I offered her a place here.”

“Why?”

A little frown creased Isabel’s brow, and she reached out and pressed her hand to the surface of the box, palm flat against it the way Elias’s was. “Because she was a person.”

Those words cut Elias to the core. “Yes.”

That got him a strange look from Isabel, sharp and questioning. “Do you think there’s anything left of her in there?”

“I do not know.” He paused, fingers tensing against the side of the box. “I could do a scan. Find out.”

“Do. And if there’s anything left...”

“Captain?”

“I don’t know what we’ll do. Just... just find out?”

Elias nodded. “Yes. Of course. I am always happy to be of assistance.”

“Thanks, Selberg.” She lingered a moment longer, frowning at him. “And maybe when you’re done...”

“Captain?”

Isabel shook her head. “Never mind. Nothing that matters.” She clapped him briefly on the shoulder before pushing off towards the entrance to the cargo bay.

And Elias was left alone.


	5. Art gallery

  
Eris tries to make friends with a dubious college-aged Dmitri.  
  


  
Eris teaches Dmitri to dance.  
  


  
Dmitri decides he's willing to let Eris take him to bed.  
  


  
Eris and Dmitri lay in bed together and have a conversation about what they want from their lives.  
  


  
Pegging in progress.  
  


  
Eris kisses Elias goodbye.  
  


  
An Eris pinup.  
  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tartarus, Revisited](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27733552) by [ssrhpurgatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory)


End file.
